Problems growing tobacco

After driving all the way from Texas with my friend Eric, we finally reached Northampton. My goal in coming here was to continue with the photo project I started during my Div III, which focused on photographing and interviewing Jamaican farmworkers working on a local tobacco farm in Massachusetts. As we drove to MA, it struck me somewhere around Chicago, what if the men weren’t there? What would I do then?

Eric told me that in June it had rained 28 days out of 31. Last year, during the middle of July, several weeks before the plants were harvested, a series of sever hailstorms hit tobacco farms in Hampshire County, MA. Before the storm, I had arranged with Alan Sanderson, a tobacco farmer in Hampshire County, to photograph the Jamaican workers on his farm. A week before the harvest, I went on a vacation. When I came back, Alan’s entire crop had been ruined. Pelting ice from the hailstorms had punched holes in his crop, making the entire crop unsellable. All of the Jamaican farmworkers had been sent away to other farms, probably a local tobacco or apple farm.

Alan’s plight echoes to the entire tobacco market in the Connecticut Valley. The Treaties on growing tobacco in the United States says, “There is perhaps no product of the soil that requires more experience, and is subject to more casualties, than a crop of tobacco” (Ramsey 136). In the field, tobacco “is subject to threats from drought, flood, wind, hail, insects, worms, blue mold and other diseases, and, in the shed, pole rot, any of which can reduce or destroy the value of the harvest” (O’Gorman 18). Buyers look for a certain quality. They want a good sized, full-bodied leaf, or a durable leaf that stretches without breaking, and a dark even colored leaf without discolorations. I became afraid that I came from Texas for nothing. What if the crop was ruined and the men had not come?